Translator's Introduction to The Ghost of the Pig — Web Exclusive
By Michael Koch
René Ariza, author of "The Ghost of the Pig," was one of the most celebrated figures in Cuban theater during the first decade after the Revolution, winning national awards for his playwriting and acclaim as an actor on both television and the stage. In 1971, however, he was expelled by the government from his theater and two years later was condemned to eight years in prison for "ideological deviation," a charge in no small measure related to his homosexuality and flamboyant personal style. After a five-year prison ordeal which included forced electroshock treatments, Ariza was released to the U.S. and to his exile.
"Exile," at its linguistic root, means "to be banished," forced to "wander aimlessly." The exiled one crosses back to the beginning, to the child's exquisite precariousness. Cut off from the cultural infrastructure necessary to produce theater, René turned to street performance, mime, acting the clown, dressing in motley, wearing a top hat, performances addressed to children, addressed to his own broken innocence. Ariza gravitated, in his exile, to regions still illumined by the original incandescence of things.
As for "The Ghost of the Pig" itself, how can we, on the threshold ofyet another 1,000 years of implausible facts and dead-on fictions ("Microscopic Animals Discovered in Milk!" "Baby Born with Pager and Sneakers!') doubt its absolute verisimilitude and that a blind couple confused their child with the piglet they were raising to slaughter, showering parental solicitude on the beast while treating their own flesh as if it were a barnyard animal? Ask Gregor Samsa about what is merely literature.
Okay, maybe the story is an allegory of alienation, a child being mistaken for something coarse and servile (apologies to the pig for this characterization) by the blind, utilitarian family of which he is a member. Cuban poet Alejandro Lorenzo calls the tale "perhaps the best metaphor of survival that I have read by a Cuban writer," but that survival is not just a matter of trying to remain viable in the face of the blight eating at the fruits of the revolution or resisting the tired philistinism of the "little folk" aghast at the exuberant mannerisms of the poet. Ariza, having lost virtually all the material and psychological props of his existence, is fighting to incarnate something he can still recognize in the wake of the betrayals and brutalizations of prison, torture, and exile.
The poet Ariza crossed from center stage to pure superfluousness. He became a supernumerary in the theatrical sense, someone with a small, nonspeakingpart, an anonymous bystander or face in the crowd. The boy in the story loses his birthright, his true voice, and is reduced to the status of a pig but an especially sentient pig able to feint and dodge and speculate. And eventually, to survive, he becomes (in his parents' imagination) the ephemeral remnant of a pig its ghost-which by now his parents suspect is none other than themselves, or their dream life, or "their other life, the one they never lived. " The "real" axis of existence keeps being displaced, but the perplexing cross-currents allow the boy, like Ariza, to cross back yet again from the margin into the crux.
Glossary
Eleggua: The spirit, saint, or deity of the crossroads in Cuban Santeria (the syncretic Catbolic/Yoruba popular religion). Cuban slaves were principally of Yoruban or Congolese origin and these two African cultures each incorporated elements of the Catholic liturgy and saints in slightly differing ways. In Haiti the same deity is known as Legba, and in Voudoun or Santeria this santo is always invoked to begin any ceremony or ritual. Eleggua is also the messenger between realms, thus resembling Mercury and Hermes in the world pantheon.
Michael Koch is a painter, poet, and translator.